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I started playing DragonVale in mid-January 2012. At first I took things slowly and didn't look anything up, but after about a month I was fully addicted and checking out the activity on the Wiki and on Facebook. Right away I noticed the large number of breeding questions, most of which could be answered pretty easily using the info provided in the market. Although, even if you understand the process, it might be nice to have a quick reference. I thought about how I might create such a tool for a few minutes (and those first ideas were pretty silly), but shelved it and moved on.

Later, on March 7th, the way to do it just popped into my head. And those breeding questions hadn't gone away, only increased. So I headed first to the App Store to see if anything already existed, and found the "DragonVale Breeding Simulator" for $0.99. Looking at the reviews, it was clear that it wasn't very good. I wanted to give the developer the benefit of the doubt, but looking further, most of his apps are poorly-rated "tips" and "guides" for popular games that actually give only the most basic and obvious information. The first review on almost every app is 5 stars from the same account. And then I noticed how he says "... right now ... on sale for just .99! This special price won't last long so act soon!" That on top of it all just really ticked me off, and anger can be a powerful motivator. I stopped my search for existing tools right there, and a couple of hours later the Breeding Sandbox was born.

I posted it on Facebook a few times and it seemed to be well-received. On March 14th, after making several tweaks, I was ready to ask Bane Cane if he might consider adding it as a resource. He did, and the rest is history...

I also need to thank my good friends KoolMikeDee and BDFresh, without whom the sandbox would not exist. They introduced me to DragonVale and have helped me shape the sandbox along the way, and they do a good job just putting up with me in general.

At my full-time job, I spend hours and hours on not-usually-very-exciting web apps that sometimes only a handful of people see. So it's really nice to do something fun and out-of-the-blue and have it reach so many people for a change. I don't know if it's reduced the number of breeding questions (doesn't seem like it, haha), but hopefully it will save some people the $0.99.

Unique Sandbox Visitors by Country

This is really outdated now...

I thought the community might be interested in this data, as it may give a rough idea of the distribution of DV players throughout the world. And if we assume that it does, you can multiply the # of visitors by a constant for a very rough estimate of total players from that country. At the time of writing that constant is 41.6. For example, Australia may have 14634 * 41.6 = about 600,000 DV players. Haha, if this is accurate at all, it would lose its accuracy as you move down the list. (Side note, Google Analytics uses as much data as possible for this particular report but has to project some of it, which is why the numbers converge at the bottom to weird groups of 2, 4, 7, 9 etc.)